And here he was now ready to catch Gretchen if she fell as he would be for as long as he lived.
“Does anybody actually know what’s happening?” Gretchen asked.
“LBJ’s people say that as soon as things quiet down they’ll restart the ceremony. Most of the marchers have just sat down in the street. Doctor King and the Vice President have gone outside to reassure people.” The old man chuckled. “LBJ’s Secret Service detail thought he was joking when he said he was going outside!”
Dan took this opportunity to ask the question that was burning on every American’s lips.
“What news is there of the President, sir?”
“They think he had some kind of seizure. A stroke or a heart attack. They say he was sick then he just keeled over. The last I heard he was still unconscious. LBJ’s running the show. He’s got the nuclear football.”
Gretchen got back to her feet, looked around at the milling crowd.
“Is somebody talking to the British and the Russians, Daddy?”
Claude Betancourt thought about it.
“I hope so… ”
Chapter 61
“Stay in this room!” Rachel Piotrowska commanded when the first explosion rocked the building. She had reached inside her handbag and pulled out the Browning automatic pistol she had been carrying around the last few days. With her free hand she retrieved the two spare magazines in the bag and dropped them in her jacket pockets, discarding her handbag on the floor.
The Ambassador, Lord Franks and his wife tried not to stare wide-eyed at Rachel. The elegant, charming spy mistress had morphed into a stranger; as if a switch had been clicked.
“I suggest you get down on the floor. Preferably behind something solid, like you desk, sir,” she put to the Ambassador. “When I leave the room please barricade the door and don’t let anybody in.”
The first floor office was not an ideal ‘safe room’ but moving the Ambassador and his wife to another part of the building when she had no idea what was waiting for her in the corridor was out of the question.
In a moment she was outside, the door slammed shut at her back.
Nobody shot her; that was probably a good sign.
The Embassy was still secure although not for much longer.
Her ears were beginning to decode the mayhem outside. Everything was confused by the chanting and screaming of the crowds in Wister Park. She recognized the discharge of pump action shot guns. The mob in the park had surged forward and broken the police cordon; killers seeded in the crowd would be scaling the seven foot walls of the compound in the next minutes. But that was not the immediate threat. Something was going on along the Bellfield Avenue frontage of the Embassy; there were long magazine-emptying bursts of automatic gunfire and grenade detonations. All around her there were running feet and shouted warnings.
The Embassy’s protection squad was gathering in the ground floor lobby. There were five or six men in uniform with Sten Guns and pistols, and two of her own people.
“We’re breaking SLRs out of the Embassy gun room!” She was told breathlessly.
Everybody was crouching low behind whatever cover they could find.
Bullets were whistling through the front entrance lobby of the building.
“Spread out!” She yelled. Any second now a grenade or a gas canister was likely to fly into the lobby. “Cover the corridors to each wing of the building. If we get over run retreat to the first floor! Nobody goes below ground! Nobody!”
There were too few of them to dissipate their strength defending basements in which they would be trapped like rats in a trap.
The front of the building must have blown in because everything was dust and buzzing quietness. Rachel coughed violently. Pulverized brick and shards of glass fell off her back as she raised herself off the floor to her knees.
She began shooting at the dark shapes moving towards her in the virtually impenetrable dust fog. The bark of the Browning kicking in her hands sounded like it was coming from the other end of a mile-long tunnel.
She saw the muzzle flash of an automatic weapon.
In the ungodly deafened hush a tall, broad form emerged out of the smoke.
The giant was hefting an old-fashioned Tommy gun.
Rachel, still on her knees was only six feet away from the man.
He stood like a statue in the ground floor lobby as the atmosphere began, very slowly, to clear. He seemed alone, unhurried, his gaze systematically surveying his surrounding as blood ran down the left side of his face.
Rachel blinked the dust out of her eyes.
She had leveled her browning at the centre of the man’s chest.
He was so close she could not miss.
He knew it; she knew it.
Her right index finger closed on the trigger, squeezed it.
And the hammer came down on an empty chamber…
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Book 4: Ask Not Of Your Country. I hope you enjoyed it — or if you didn’t, sorry — but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilization depends on people like you.
These days I get asked quite a lot about my plans for Timeline 10/27/62; which is a bit tricky because obviously, one is always at pains to avoid putting inadvertent spoilers ‘out there’.
However, without offering ‘spoiler hostages’ I think I owe it to my readers to level with you as much as possible about my plans.
Ask Not Of Your Country is the twelfth installment of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series — or rather, ‘saga’ as it has become — and the simple answer to the question: what do I plan to do with the series? Is that I shall carry on!
I want to find out what happens in the alternative universe of Timeline 10/27/62 as much as my readers; I am as curious as you about what happens next, and in the coming years to the band of survivors from the first dozen books!
So, any suggestion that I contemplated — even for a moment — drawing a ‘line in the sand’ with The Mountains of the Moon could not possibly be farther from the truth.
At the time of writing I am working on future installments to the series for 2017. There will be a fifth USA book The American Dream set in 1964, and two more Main Series books All Along the Watchtower and Crow on the Cradle also set in 1964. All three of these books are scheduled for release in 2017.